Thursday, September 2, 2010

A Letter To My Fellow Women

I write to you tonight to ask you to join me in a movement, to come together, empower each other, and agree on a set of goals to establish a permanent equality for ourselves and for our children. Our unity is needed to implement great change.

Let us agree to be supporters of one another. Members of a single team. Let us help each other become masters of ourselves. Let us never tear each other down, in secret or in public. Let us stand up for one another, and never expose each other. Let us evolve, and laugh, and create, and explore. Let us love each other completely for our common responsibility.

Let us not be fooled by our cultures, our religions, the media, our families claiming our place is in the home, inferior to that of a man's. Let us never lose sight that women are equal to men. Let us remind each other of our strengths, of our intelligence, of our talents, of our creativity, of our progressiveness. Let us work together to prevent men from believing we are nothing more than their sexual playthings, and let us never be the ones to promote this illusion.

Let us change society's rigid rules by not changing our last names, or by showing the world our loud sense of humor, or having our men be stay-at-home-dads. Let us change the channel on the radio when we hear a song that is degrading to women and let us speak up and defend each other if someone tries to put one of us down.

Lets work harder in our education and our careers to show ourselves and our men that we can do anything a man can do. Let us raise our daughters to believe they can and should pursue any career they desire. Professor, doctor, judge, teacher, writer, athlete, engineer. Let us raise our sons to respect women and their careers, and to believe them to be their equals. Let us be sisters to each other.

We need each other greatly, and the world needs our unity.

If we can somehow do this, maybe then the men will follow.

"Woman must not accept; she must challenge.She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her;she must reverence that woman in her which struggles for expression." -Margaret Sangar

2 comments:

I feel that the unity of women is fundamentally lacking in American Society. Just the other day I heard a women yell, “That’s my song,” when a song that degraded women to nothing more than a sexual objects came on the radio. This kind of wide spread support by women, for things that actually belittle women, sends the wrong message to the public medium at large. If women do not come together and take a stand against music that regularly refers to women as “bitches” and “hoes,” what will stop future artist from using similarly demoralizing language in their songs? What will stop Hollywood for creating their image of the ideal women, if women don’t come together in an effort to stop supporting the production of movies that show women as being simple minded, gossip driven, Barbie dolls? The only way to make advancements and truly get the respect that is deserved, is to speak with one voice, which is fully backed with support, and this can only be possible if unity is fostered.

Thank you YazzyYazzy, and let me respond here with a resounding "Aye! Aye!" I have witnessed too many occasions when women were hypercritical of each other, discussing each other's choices with more scorn than any man could muster. I have seen female supervisors deriding third generation feminists, because they "want it all." As if wanting it all was tantamount to actually having it all, and as if having it all wasn't a continuous struggle.

Our fight for equality is not over yet, we only won a couple of battles. We have to still march on as united as possible. I don't even want to imagine what would happen if we didn't do so.